Word comes that the vote on the Baucus health-care plan will be pushed back a week or so because some lawmakers actually want to know how much the darn thing costs. The CBO, which has been uncomfortably honest for the White House’s tastes, will get another shot at debunking the numbers. Meanwhile, the road to a floor vote looks a bit rockier. Maybe the Senate Finance version will be combined with the version floating around in the Health, Education, Pension, and Labor Committee. (Is “HELP” really a good acronym for a serious legislative entity? I’m not sure an SOS signal is really a confidence builder.) As the AP described it:

It’s still not clear what the product will look like finally, including whether it embraces any version of a government-run plan. Whatever it looks like, it will face a barrage of amendments once it gets to the Senate floor, and it could easily go down in flames like former President Bill Clinton’s attempt at a health care overhaul in 1994.

While all this is going on, Democrats haven’t resolved their internal fight over the public option. The president really likes the idea, we are led to believe, but there won’t be any Republicans to support it, and dozens of Blue Dogs will likewise bolt if it is included. And what does the president want? He’s not telling us — still. He’s back on the dog-and-pony circuit, meeting with doctors and issuing the same tired platitudes. (You’d think everyone was weary, even inside the White House bubble, of hearing pabulum like ”this reform effort is desperately needed.”)

But what is it going to cost, who’s going to pay for it, how are we going to control cost, and who really wants this thing to pass anyway? It is becoming a gigantic blur, as if everyone is simply going through the motions, hoping at the end of the day that legislators be overcome with a sense of urgency and decide to vote for the largest, most complicated, and expensive piece of legislation in history — without support from a majority of voters. It doesn’t quite seem as though we’re getting there, at least not yet.

Still, it’s a positive step that lawmakers at least get to see the price tag first. And then they might even want to know who’s going to pay for it and what the impact on hiring might be. Maybe we should even have some hearings and think about that for a while. After all, if the president can take his sweet time deciding strategy for a real crisis (a war), we shouldn’t rush into solving a contrived crisis (health care) before we are absolutely sure we are going to get it right. And it’s hard to get it right when you don’t know what is in the final never-need-to-ever-fix-it-again ObamaCare plan.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 7:08 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.